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Re-Queening a Hive is Hard

Lorraine, my beekeeping mentor, came over today with a young woman who recently acquired a hive. As you may recall, I moved a frame of brood into my empty hive, hoping to start a new one, but no luck. Then at the end of May when Lorraine came over, she tried with another frame, but today when we inspected, we could see there’s still no queen in there.

Without a queen it just won’t work and sure enough we had a lot of dead bees and ants in the bottom which isn’t a good sign. So Lorraine thought what the heck, this time let’s move a full box of 10 frames over and stick it on the crummy hive and see what happens.

She said I have a 50-50 chance of starting a new hive, so let’s see if this finally works. If not, then it’s proving to be an extremely difficult thing to do. But surely, in nature, bees know how to make a new queen when one is needed. However so far they’re remaining obstinate and refusing to do it.

Today was one of those ungodly hot Okanagan days, so at several points I had to either stand in the shade, or else walk away and remove my hood to wipe my eyes as I had salty sweat stinging them. That’s definitely one of the downsides to beekeeping: it’s bloody hot.

But then I thought I should be glad, as I started a low carb diet eleven days ago, and so I figure with all this sweat I should drop a pound or two just from that. It’s so extremely slow to lose weight at this age it’s almost a physics puzzle.

For example, when my usual fat self, I eat like a horse, and just hold the gargantuan size or else gain a bit. However when I finally decide that’s it, and cut out all of those things I love to eat, my body goes nah ah. Nope. And it takes days and days of very little food, and all of it low carb, and then the needle on the scale moves ever so glacially to the left. Why?

I’m happy to say Margaret’s bought a condo and is moving to Kelowna to work at UBC Okanagan. She’s very excited to become a homeowner and I’m happy too as now we can fly out of here together on any future jaunts.

The only fly in the ointment for Margaret is her 10 year old cat, who makes that very loud yowling sound when locked in a kennel in a car. She said she could move to Kelowna if someone moved the cat for her, so I said I can move him. I’ll therefore have to head down there end of July to pick up kitty, and hope to arrive in Kelowna with my mind intact.

I spent a couple of hours at the Liberal tent on Canada Day as a volunteer to hand out buttons. We were stationed right near the lagoon at the Grand Hotel, and it was a stormy day. Suddenly a gale kicked up, blowing all written materials from our tables and scattering other people’s tents. Luckily ours held.

And so the summer goes, with bees, cat plans, and Liberal events. And in case I thought I’d ever remain alone, Nicky wants to sell his place and move back home.